Jason Isaacs Spent Decades as an Underrated Character Actor—Then ‘The White Lotus’ Came Along

In Always Great, Awards Insider speaks with Hollywood’s greatest undersung actors in career-spanning conversations. In this installment, Jason Isaacs talks about the hits, misses, and everything in between that led to his complex turn on the HBO megahit The White Lotus.

Jason Isaacs played an integral part in one of history’s most successful film series, appeared in major blockbusters directed by the likes of Roland Emmerich and Michael Bay, and has remained a consistent screen presence for more than three decades. But he’s never experienced anything like the attention coming his way for The White Lotus season three.

an awkward CBS Mornings exchange in which Gayle King, Tony Dokoupil, and Vladimir Duthiers pressed him to reveal whether his full-frontal scene in The White Lotus featured prosthetics. Isaacs declined to answer—“What is the obsession with penises? It’s an odd thing”—and instead called out a gender double standard, arguing that Oscar winner Mikey Madison was not asked about her “vulva” during the campaign for Anora, a film in which she played a sex worker.

This generated some controversy online, which Isaacs is well aware of. “It was horrifying to me for it to look like I don’t understand—and haven’t been horrified by watching—young women being exploited and exposed and abused in so many ways over the years,” he tells me. “What I was trying to say, even if it came out wrong, is [that] even in that context where women have been treated so badly for so long, I still have never witnessed anyone being so specifically grilled about their genitalia. Enjoy the show. Enjoy chatting about ‘Is it a prosthetic or not?’ But don’t grill a 61-year-old actor with, ‘Have I actually seen your actual penis? It’s important for me to know.’ That’s just plain weird.”

It’s easy to understand where he’s coming from, especially because this is all fairly new to Isaacs. He built a distinctive career on eschewing fame—sometimes intentionally, sometimes not.

The chameleonic Liverpool native started regularly appearing in films and series in his mid-20s and resisted the pull of Hollywood, even as the town started calling a few years into his career. While working on the 1998 Irish black comedy Divorcing Jack, Isaacs received a call at two in the morning from an agent, with maybe a half dozen people on the line. “We’ve got great news, it can’t wait—Michael Bay wants you to be in Armageddon,” the agent said. Isaacs replied: “Right. Well, that’s nice. Who’s that? What is that?” He got the full breakdown, including the specific offer to portray one of the film’s young astronauts in training—such astronaut roles were eventually accepted by the likes of Ben Affleck and Owen Wilson—but he didn’t say yes. Isaacs was told he needed to get to the set on Tuesday, and he explained why that would not be possible: He wasn’t about to abandon Divorcing Jack.

“They go, ‘Jason, you have to understand something: This is a Bruce Willis project,’” Isaacs says. “I went, ‘Well, you know, this is a David Thewlis project.’” The phone call ended without a clear path forward. But all sides came to a compromise days later: Isaacs accepted a smaller role that required him to film for only eight days, allowing him to do both movies.

The actor tells this story as a kind of thesis statement for the way he’s approached his career. “Numbers of times over the years, I’ve been offered those jobs that other people take and are thrilled with, where you point a gun every day at someone and your biggest decision is ‘blue suit or black suit?’—and you end up with an enormous amount of money and can’t walk down the street, but you have a speedboat and five houses,” he says. “It’s not that I shun the spotlight or anything. I’m just trying to find interesting and good things to do.”

Isaacs’s big-screen breakthrough came a few years after Armageddon, in The Patriot—Emmerich’s bloody Revolutionary War drama starring Mel Gibson. Isaacs jolts the historical film with his deliciously cruel villain, a British colonel who kills Gibson’s character’s son. Isaacs makes every scene feel more tense, more upsetting, more darkly human. The role was originally meant for Jude Law, but the then rising star passed on it, leaving an opening for Isaacs (who’d sent in a self-tape). He made it count.

After the movie came out, “I was offered every bad guy under the sun opposite every single A-list star,” Isaacs says. “They’d look at me like I was speaking Sanskrit. They’re going, ‘But don’t you understand, it’s opposite fill in the blank,’ whatever giant-biceps superstar was fashionable in the day. And I’d go, ‘But it’s a bad part.’” He didn’t take any of those roles, despite his representatives at the time being “clearly interested, for their sake, in money or fame.” Instead, Isaacs chose to do a play at the Royal Court in his home country, then played a trans woman opposite Charlize Theron and Keanu Reeves in the 2001 flop Sweet November. “You can’t be typecast—you can be type-offered,” Isaacs says. “You’re only typecast when you accept the job.”

Still, opportunity was knocking. Isaacs appeared in Ridley Scott’s Oscar-winning Black Hawk Down, joined the Harry Potter cinematic universe as Lucius Malfoy, and, most auspiciously, toplined the call sheet for Universal’s epic Peter Pan movie, budgeted at $130 million (around $225 million in today’s dollars). Isaacs took on the dual roles of Captain Hook and Mr. Darling, but sensed things were off from the moment studio heads landed on Australia’s Gold Coast, where production took place.

“I was 40 and I was sober and I had a kid, so I didn’t listen to anything anyone was saying. But they were going, ‘Get ready. You’ll never sit down and ride on a plane again. Make sure you know who your real friends are now. We’ve got all this money aside for an Oscar budget for you,’” Isaacs says. “I was thinking, I could write this down as a sketch. It’s hilarious.” His bemused skepticism of the studio hype machine proved unfortunately prescient: Despite decent reviews—and a fascinating dual turn from Isaacs—Peter Pan bombed hard. The lack of awards recognition turned out to be the least of Isaacs’s problems.

“All of us involved were toxic,” Isaacs says. “I couldn’t get a walk-on in CSI. I couldn’t get a dinner theater job.” Then and there, Isaacs felt his film career had “died on the vine.”

Isaacs continued to make Harry Potter movies, but was convinced to pivot to the small screen—considered, at the time, “a seismic step down” for actors. Turns out he was getting in at the right moment. His first post–Peter Pan TV part came on The West Wing. Within a few years, he was tapped to lead the underrated Showtime series Brotherhood opposite Jason Clarke, and received his first Golden Globe nomination for the British political thriller The State Within. And his film career wasn’t exactly dead either. Isaacs started getting cast by terrific indie directors like Rodrigo García (Nine Lives) and Nicole Holofcener (Friends With Money). More recently, he did searing, devastating work in Mass, playing the grieving father of a son lost to gun violence.

“I would only make films like that, if I could, back to back for the rest of my life,” Isaacs says. “But I’d also be selling fake handbags on Fifth Avenue to try and pay for food.”

And so, for about the past decade, Isaacs has kept on his path: balancing the demands of making a living with keeping things fresh and never doing the same thing twice. He speaks often, if contentedly, of vague missed opportunities. “There was a moment in the 2010s when me and Kyle Chandler were being offered the most pilots. We were both offered insane amounts of pilots every year because it was kind of self-fulfilling—once you were offered two, and it was in the papers or on Deadline or something, other people offered you [things],” he says. “We would sometimes text each other about them. He made some very smart choices that ran for years, and I didn’t.” (Isaacs top-lined one-season dramas Awake and Dig, and later starred in the first season of Star Trek: Discovery.)

He’s also learned to keep some of his show business tales to himself. Isaacs says he “could only have played cartoon villains for a long time” in terms of the offers that came his way because of The Patriot and, later, Harry Potter. What projects did he turn down? “It feels like it’s the wrong thing to do as an actor, to talk about jobs you didn’t do,” he says. He also admits to navigating plenty of Hollywood nonsense in his years working with major studios and networks. What kind of nonsense? “By God, have I fantasized of telling the truth about some of the appalling behavior, or some of the things I’ve seen or what really went on behind the scenes,” Isaacs says. “That’s just career-burning. But I do dream that one day I can tell all the stories.”

The White Lotus, fortunately, does not fall into that category. Isaacs has never chased the kind of buzz that surrounds Mike White’s Emmy-winning anthology. But then, it feels right for such an eclectic, unusual career to wend its way back toward a big, fat hit. His rich, dryly comic performance highlights his hallmarks as an actor: his penchant for accents so specific that viewers assume they’re off the mark; his skill at working in moral gray areas; and, of course, his steadfast desire to avoid any material that feels familiar. “[White] doesn’t do anything categorizable, anything you think you can put in a box,” the actor says. “[His characters] surprise you. He’s all about layers and humanity. He’s not even judging these characters that you might think that he’s judging. He’s just showing you who they are.”

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